I've Seen The Future, Brother, And It's Murder

[poliphilo]

 Dystopias are inherently conservative.  They project contemporary trends into a future where all their negative implications are realised and all their benefits fall away. Human beings, they tell us, cannot be trusted with science- and new technologies will always be used to oppress and destroy- so turn your back on progress and stick with the tested verities of  family, home and the boy or girl next door. Don't go up to the big city, child, stay here in the village and help mum and dad raise goats. Above all, be safe.

No, I don't like Brave New World. I don't like its snooty cynicism about human nature and I don't think it's much cop as a novel either. Characterisation is minimal, ambiguity has gone walkabout. The first thirty or forty pages are devoted to the itemisation of a process of baby-manufacture which was always fanciful and which actual scientific progress has rendered terribly wide of the mark- which means, apart from anything else- that it's boring. Nothing dates faster than prophecy. The satire is broad, unsubtle- in the manner of undergraduate review. And why in the name of Ford is a consumerist society that has scrubbed out its history full of people named for the heroes of international communism? A girl called Lenina? Give me a break. Maybe if I read on I'll be given a cogent reason- but I'm not going to enjoy reading on. 

It's all so terribly 20th century.

Comments

[cmcmck]

There were a lot of little girls called Lenina in the Soviet Union.......

Not to mention Stalina, but let's not go there!

[poliphilo]

I stand corrected. :)

[cmcmck]

And talking of dystopias, have you read Yevgeny Zamyatin's: 'We'?

[poliphilo]

No. You recommend?

[sovay]

No, I don't like Brave New World.

I haven't read it in years, so I am willing to believe it doesn't hold up as well as Nineteen Eighty-Four or Fahrenheit 451, both of which I read the same summer for the same grade, but it gave me the phrase "I'm so glad I'm a Beta," which has been useful in discussing various forms of social programming since.

The idea of the right to be unhappy was done very well in Cordwainer Smith's stories about the Instrumentality of Mankind, published between 1950 and (the last ones posthumously) 1979. It may be relevant than Smith's future universe is not a dystopia, is in fact fairly morally complicated and colorful, and remains some of my favorite science fiction. The complete cycle was collected in 1993 as The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith and the centerpiece novel Norstrilia (1964/1975) reprinted by NESFA Press in 1995. I recommend them both.

The other reason dystopias are so often conservative is that in their insistence on making all options bad options, they teach that there is no point in resistance or growth or change. So you might as well not lead the rebellion against the evil overlords, because the rebels will be just as cruel and exploitative when they get their chance; above all you mustn't seek power for yourself, because you'll use it just as badly as the next person; keep your head down and endure. I don't think this is what many of them think they are saying, but it's a too-common theme. And it angers me a lot when I see it, because it's just another way of upholding the status quo: fighting injustice is too hard and you might get it wrong, might as well not bother.

[poliphilo]

I haven't read Cordwainer Smith. Thanks for the recommendation.

Just as there's no point in rebelling against the overlords so there's no point in trying to better the human condition through science and research. I don't suppose Huxley would have thought of himself as being anti-scientific- but all the science we see in BNW is bad science- or rather science used in the service of oppression- and the moral seems to be don't mess with test tubes, boys and girls, because only harm can come of it.

A few years back I read Island- which is Huxley's attempt to balance BNW with a Utopia. It's a very bad novel but not so very much worse than BNW.

The Huxley I have time for is the groovy old Californian dude who wrote books about mysticism and psychedelics.

[sovay]

I haven't read Cordwainer Smith. Thanks for the recommendation.

He's one of my favorite science fiction writers and less obscure than he used to be, but still not as celebrated as he deserves. I discovered him with "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" (1962), which I still love. It looks as though a number of other stories are available at the same site if you like it enough to read more.

It's a very bad novel but not so very much worse than BNW.

Is it bad in the same ways?

The Huxley I have time for is the groovy old Californian dude who wrote books about mysticism and psychedelics.

I can see that.

[poliphilo]

Bad in the same ways? Pretty much. Lots of unsubtle ideas presented unsubtly. Huxley tries to make Island look like commercial fiction by giving us a pov character who's a hardboiled private investigator- which adds an extra layer of ineptitude.